


T0PH4T's OC Snippets

by TopHat



Category: Bionicle - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Let's Make Bionicle Relevant Again, Pic of the Character at the End, Self-Indulgent OC's
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:55:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27199495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TopHat/pseuds/TopHat
Summary: Where I try to recapture my childhood and hone my writing skills at the same time.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	1. Shataxor

For a moment, all Shataxor could feel was pain.

Then his training asserted itself, and he shoved the hurt into a ball and threw it away. Lash out, make anything around him wish it wasn’t, and absorb as much detail about the environment as possible. Once basic safety was assured, he’d regroup, find out what the new primary objective is, how to get to it, and who he needed to kill along the way. Simple stuff he’d done a thousand times before, and being abducted by a massive, sharp-toothed titan wasn’t going to change that.

Except this time Shataxor’s training failed him immediately. When he opened his mouth he took in a lungful of something that tasted like a Vhotarak spinner, kicked off the floor into the ceiling through a fluid which was certainly _not_ liquid protodermis, and began choking and blacking out at the same time.

The last thought Shataxor had before blackness was, _If Hydraxon could see me now, he’d end me himself_.

* * *

“This is your post,” the tall, golden-and-blue armored figure said, a double-bladed sword in one hand and a decidedly-bored expression on his face. “Enjoy.”

Shataxor stepped through the portal and reached out with his senses. The air smelled like salt, something that liquid protodermis distinctly did _not_ have. The grass under his feet was alive and untamed, likely never worked or trod on before today. In the distance he could see mountains and valleys, the former caped by ice and the later barren rock. Bird cries echoed in his ears, sharp and high, distinctly towards the tropical end of the spectrum.

He was set up for a nice, long stay in paradise, then.

By the time Shataxor turned back around, the portal from the Order’s headquarters was closed. That was to be expected though: when one fought for stakes as high as the life and mind of the universe, one had to be more paranoid than most thought possible. With threats as varied as Rahi and puissant as The Brotherhood of Makuta, doing the equivalent of closing one’s doors and shuttering one’s blinds was just good sense.

It did make the open field feel a little more lonely, though.

He spent the rest of the day simply wandering. It would still be some time before Matoran found their way to this particular island, and in the meantime he needed to familiarize himself with the terrain and local Rahi. While the majority of Rahi were created to be fundamentally peaceful creatures, there had been enough surprises that the Order decided to take a more hands-on approach to dealing with the problem.

That was where Shataxor came in. He was to monitor the local Rahi populations, ensure that they neither bred uncontrollably nor went extinct, and otherwise make it so that the other thinking inhabitants would have no reason to suspect that anything had gone wrong with the Great Being’s plans.

“Mata Nui helps those who help themselves,” he muttered, running his left hand up a tree trunk, savoring the texture of the bark. The hardest part of his training had been the mental work, staying still for days on end. The psychic attacks had been almost inconsequential when compared to the restlessness.

Now he was free, though, and could explore to his heart’s content.

* * *

Shataxor came to, and that was a surprise.

This time, he didn’t launch himself into the air like a madman. Instead he remained still, eyes closed, waiting for a sound that would tell him it wasn’t safe to get up.

When it didn’t come, he lifted his head.

The first thing he noticed was the slight resistance of moving through a substance thicker than air. The next was that there was a distinct lack of suffering as he inhaled only liquid. Finally, that his right hand felt _off_ , in the way his left had felt before he acclimated to the prosthesis.

When he looked down, what he saw was a crooked limb, one that had a claw growing out halfway down its forearm, and a jagged spike of bone instead of a hand.

“What in the name of Mata Nui...” he muttered, the words alien to his own ears. The water must have been warping them, because his voice was _not_ that raspy, and his jaw certainly didn’t have an underbite. His legs had been longer, hadn’t had _fins_ on his calves that could feel every eddy in the water around him, and he distinctly _didn’t_ remember seeing all these new _colors_ that radiated off the walls, the floor, his own, newly _monstrous_ features...

Shataxor was so hypnotized by his new form that he almost didn’t notice the broken door to his cell, nor the utter darkness around him.

* * *

The millenia had begun to grate on him.

Shataxor had discipline in spades. He could sharpen a knife to such an edge that it could split a leaf which fell on it, or throw one so accurately that it could snatch a morsel out of the beak of a Gukko bird without harming it. He could pilot half a hundred different vehicles, or free-dive off a cliff and no-sell the fall through strategic application of his Mask of Stillness. He’d even learned how to lay a half-way decent ambush, though that particular talent had required a longer training than any other.

The quality all of those activities possessed, however, which was distinctly absent in his everyday life, was _action_.

Shataxor wasn’t reckless. Perhaps he’d been bull-headed in the past, but losing an arm in one of the Order’s last-ditch attempts to hold back the Visorak hordes had cured him of that. The absence of feeling, of constantly misjudging how far he had to reach for things, those were reminders of the cost of thinking one was more than they were, and he considered it a small price to pay much of the time.

It was different, however, to pay in a small way every day, than to pay in the form of lost opportunity. Each day he spent checking the same Rahi dens was a day he wasn’t exploring the world was a day he wasn’t seeing something new, or finding a new Rahi species, or in some way stimulating his dangerously-bored mind. At this point he’d been all over the island twice, even in the places where the Matoran had set up their village and the fortress the novice Toa of the island (the Toa Kalma or Keela or somesuch) considered impenetrable, and frankly speaking had felt mostly unimpressed even the first time around. Where were the volcanoes, the plunging canyons, the waterfalls?

Even paradise got boring without a little more action than a rabid hive of Nui-Jaga every century or so.

Shataxor still remembered his mission: keep the Rahi populations under control. He remembered the specific requirements as well, such as ‘don’t become known to the other denizens of the island’ and ‘if you do eliminate the witnesses.’ At the same time, he had to wonder if it would be possible to simply... _leave_ , for a bit. Not a decade, not a year, but enough time to have a novel experience to think about as he watched the Matoran go about their work for the millionth time, blissfully unaware of the monsters he defeated before they could truly threaten any of them.

A plan started to form in his mind, and as began stalking towards the sleeping Fader Bull, Shataxor wondered what he might see on his sabbatical from purgatory.

* * *

It’d been a trial, adapting to the Pit.

Shataxor had heard stories about the prison, things that were at once mere myths meant to keep the rank-and-file in line and then also practical explanations of the consequences of abandoning the mission of the Order of Metru Nui. If one decided that their own ambitions were more important than the reawakening of the universe’s spirit, then one could expect a visit from Botar, a beating, and to disappear from the parts of the world that mattered for however long it took for the sun to grow cold.

He’d also beaten the information out of three different former prisoners, and Shataxor still didn’t quite believe that he’d been sent there.

“What am I doing here?” Shataxor muttered to himself, squatting on a rock upon the edge of a chasm. “What did I do wrong?”

It was a rhetorical question. Shataxor knew where he’d strayed from the Plan. He knew with painful certainty where and when he’d earned the ire of his superiors, what crime he was guilty of, and why he’d been sent to the Pit instead of anywhere else.

What he couldn’t figure out was _what else they’d expected him to do!_

“Rrrrrrargh!”

Shataxor’s left arm spasmed, whipping its metal extension into a short arc that terminated in an explosion of stone, sending grey powder and shards screaming through the water, and leaving a crater where before there’d been seabed. “I tried! I gave millennia to you! I remained loyal after the Hand was disbanded, after the Makuta defected! I kept the secrets, I followed the rules, and after messing up _once_ you abandon me!?”

“Grrrrrrah!”

A silver blur shot over his shoulder, leaving a trail of bubbles where it passed. Shataxor stared at where it impacted the crevasse wall, a crack forming from the point of impact and disappearing down into oblivion. His former seat groaned where he sunk his foreclaw into it, then spilt when he twisted the strange joint that now worked where his wrist had been.

So much power, and not one iota of it could be used to get his life back.

_He hadn’t meant to leave the Matoran to die!_

* * *

Venka Nui was a disaster.

It had more volcanoes than wells. The crevasse which littered its surface were home to Rahi that had more venomous stings among them than beating hearts. Its forests were tangled messes of poison vines and glinting eyes. The great desert which cut the island in half was hotter than hell, drier than the remains of a Boggarak’s prey, and hid more true monsters under its sand dunes than Alum Nui had on its surface.

In short, Shataxor was in love.

It wasn’t that he was in danger. It would take a creature of incredible puissance to get close to being a threat to the Order, even a junior one. The novelty of each encounter though, the surprise at each ambush, the brief moments where he had to operate on instinct rather than planning... each instance sent a cold shock of awareness through his nerves, shocking his eyes awake and making the world feel just that much more alive.

He didn’t lose so much of himself that he forgot to swim to Alum Nui after his three days were up.

Those three days saved his mind. They saved it again centuries later, then decades, and then on a yearly basis Shataxor would soothe his ragged nerves by swimming across an ocean, running around in an environment as twitchy as he was, and then returning to the enforced peace of a blissfully ignorant population. 

It worked until one day he pulled himself up the face of a cliff and found Helryx waiting for him.

* * *

“Go away.”

After eviscerating a pack of Takea sharks who thought he looked like lunch, most denizens of the pit had learned to leave Shataxor alone. That didn’t stop the occasional up-jumped psycho from trying their luck with a former member of the Order of Mata Nui, but the rahi bones did send a pretty clear message to any of the monsters with at least half a total brain.

“What are you?”

That, however, did not sound like a monster.

When Shataxor turned around, he saw a Ga-Matoran staring back at him. It didn’t look like one of the Matorans that had been on Alum Nui, but given that they were literally by the Pit it was surprising that Matoran existed at all.

“I’m brooding,” he replied. “Very important, very dangerous.”

“Sounds boring. Do you want to help me harvest the airweed instead?” she asked.

Shataxor looked up, towards the shelf of rock where the life-giving/death-dealing plant grew, then back to the Ga-Matoran. “Could I ask you to help me harvest a vampire eel?”

“Point taken.” The Ga-Matoran swam a little closer, seemingly unafraid of his numerous sharp edges. “The Hydruka do most of the work on their own anyways. I’m just really bored.”

Shataxor sighed. “So you decided to approach a random stranger and strike up a conversation?” he asked.

“It beats waiting to be eaten,” she answered.

For a while they sat together in silence.

“Are you a type of shark?”

Shataxor turned to look at her. “What?”

She shrugged. “Well, you didn’t tell what you were, so now I’m guessing. Are you a crab?”

“Wrong again,” he said, turning back the depths.

“What about an eel?”

“No.”

“Lobster?”

“No.”

“Shrimp?”

* * *

“How many Matoran are on this island?”

“What!?”

They were back on Arum Nui. Well, Helryx was back on the island. Shataxor was focusing as hard as he could on his Mask of Stillness, trying to resist the whirlpool that was trying to pull him down into the depths. Against an ordinary Toa it’ve been no contest, but Helryx was to Toa of Water as the Zivon was to a rank-and-file Visorak: technically part of the same species, but so much more dangerous that the conflation of the two was more a technicality than truth.

“How many. Matoran. Live on Arum Nui? You’ve been here for long enough to know how to slip through the forest without disturbing a leaf, surely you were able to find out who you were supposed to protect.”

His focus slipped, and Shataxor felt himself drop a few feet before regaining control of his mask power. “I dealt with the Rahi, kept an eye out for Rahkshi, and stayed hidden! I did my job!”

“No, you did what you wanted,” Helryx said, her voice becoming colder than any Toa of Ice Shataxor had ever known. “You fought the Rahi because it wasn’t boring, you looked for the Rahkshi because it would’ve been more fun than the Rahi, and stayed hidden because the only thing worse than doing that would be doing nothing.

“Every lookout who’s actually paid attention to their position knows the habits of their charges, when they wake up, what chores they do, where they sneak off to daydream, _something_. You did the bare minimum, addressing the major issues which threatened the encampment without adding anything to the island.

“You were a leech, and because of it six Matoran are dead.”

The whirlpool cut out, which was a good thing because the last sentence had shattered what was left of Shataxor’s self-control.

“Dead?”

“As in, not alive. Anwanden, Gamala, Citru, Sendal, Enphen, and Mura.” Each name fell like a boulder, making Shataxor wish he could simply drown, leaving the sharpness on his insides behind. “Six beings, created by Mata Nui, each an element in the Great Plan no less important than you or I, now gone, lost to a Mukka Cat.

“Gone, because you couldn’t live without a fight.”

The water spat him out and into the arms of a great blue-and-gold being, one with a great maw of teeth that he remembered from the penal codes of his training.

“Botar, send him to the Pit.”

* * *

For the first time since he’d learned of the negligence that cost him his life, Shataxor had an existence which wasn’t a constant reminder of how much he’d lost.

Every six days, Shataxor would return to his perch by the airfields. After some period of time the Ga-Matoran would join him, at which point she would proceed to begin a (mostly) one-sided conversation. She would tell him about her life, about the goings-on in Mahri Nui, about the biology of various creatures she worked with, about anything which seemed to come to mind. He mostly restrained his contributions to monosyllabic affirmations or brief pieces of biting sarcasm, careful to never actually aim any hurtful words her way.

Sometimes, however, Shataxor’s boldness got the better of him.

“Why did you approach me?” he asked one day.

The Ga-Matoran paused mid-rant. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I assume that if you’ve lived this long down here, you know that most things don’t look at Matoran as much more than a snack.” The sentence felt strange in his mouth, extravagant, lavish after so much time spent essentially silent. “Why risk waking a monster?”

The Ga-Matoran rolled her eyes. “Please. If you’d wanted to abduct a Matoran, I’d have been dead the day we met. Plus, the other sea life avoids you.” She nodded at the waters around them. “Not so much as a venom eel in sight. Either you’re running a con longer than the Cord or you eat the things that eat me. It’s safer here than in the waters around Mahri Nui, to be honest.”

Shataxor’s forehead wrinkled. “So this is some sort of elaborate host/parasite relationship?”

“You’re also the only person who lets me keep talking as much as I want. The other Matorans think I’m weird.”

Another silence settled, and this time Shataxor felt that he should be the one to break it.

“A long time ago, a long way away from here, I worked with Rahi.” He wasn’t Order anymore, but Shataxor would keep his word. Anything from his past would require redactions, but sharing non-specific details _shouldn’t_ get him into any more trouble than he was already in. “Rahi don’t have good memories, but they do have iron-clad instincts. Playing on those let me ensure they went where I needed them to, and avoided the places I wanted to keep intact.”

“What sort of rahi did you work with?” the Ga-Matoran asked.

_Hordes of Visorak. Fenrakk nests miles deep. Packs of Kane-Ra Bulls infected by madness. Dragons. Anything dangerous enough that anything less than an army of Toa would run and hide, and that an army of Toa couldn’t reliably defeat._

“Dangerous ones.” He made a cutting gesture with his clawed hand. “More dangerous than I look now.”

The Ga-Matoran took the hint and nodded. “We usually rely on Hydruka’s desire to not to get eaten to make them come back to the city, but a few go missing between the airfields and their enclosures anyway. Don’t suppose you have any idea about how to make that number go down?”

“Describe them to me.” When the Ga-Matoran simply looked at him, Shataxor sighed. “Please. Sorry.”

“You’re forgiven,” she said. “And my name is Amaru.”

“Shataxor.”

It took too much out of him to say his own name, but he felt lighter afterward.

* * *


	2. The Scientist

Science was like a knife.

Kelzara did not believe this to be a particularly revolutionary concept. Many things were like knives, the knife being a stand-in for the truth that objects did not hold morality. Instead it was thinking beings that gave shape to such ideas, making the idea of a ‘moral’ object necessarily nonsensical.

How this saying did, however, truly convey meaning was when applied to surgery.

“I need quiet.” An application of Power (referred to by many as ‘sonics,’ but not, in fact, substantially distinct from any other application of the Makura’s natural abilities) carried the message to Marli. “Tell the spectators to leave.”

The Ga-Matoran promptly began shushing and ushering her fellow Matorans away, and with fewer eyes on him Kelzara went back to attempt to save the Ta-Matoran on the slab in front of him. There were still Rahi teeth inside of him, some fragmented, some not, and the organic tissue had been lacerated in multiple places. His heart stone was beating only weakly, and the steady flow of power Kelzara fed him wouldn’t keep the body alive for long.

She did not resent the Toa for failing to arrive at the site of the Rahi attack in a timely manner, but she did resent their unwillingness to take blame for their actions.

“Stupid Matoran,” Maranga, the Toa of Fire, said, crossing two burly arms. “Should’ve known better than to step outside the walls.”

Zaru huffed in agreement, crossing his arms in agreement. The team’s vice-captain took after his leader in all the worst ways, and was (in fact) the least-tolerable Toa of Water Kelzara had yet met. “What was he thinking?”

Kafuku, the Toa of Air, declined to comment, but the slight sense sometimes called ‘magnetism’ by the non-scientists detected an increase in pressure around the Toa’s hands. Of the defenders of Kelzara’s domain she disliked him the least, as (unlike his five companions) he did not make a habit of speaking unless he was certain he had something to contribute.

Too conservative a view for science, but more than sufficient for the position of ‘lab assistant.’

“That means you too,” she said, finally pulling out a particularly jagged shard of protodermis from the Matoran’s chest. “Get out.” The horn of the Castaba Lizard appeared to be  _ too _ hard, which (in addition to endangering Matoran) could also allow them to destroy their environment faster than it could be recreated or restructured, either by Matoran or other Rahi.

Her job would be so much easier if Mata Nui would simply  _ explain _ why Matoran could not be modified like other living creatures, but it was not Kelzara’s to question why.

Maranga reacted exactly the way Kelzara wanted him to, puffing up his chest and stepping towards her in what was probably supposed to be an intimidating fashion. “The Toa are charged with protecting the Matoran, and if you think we’re going to abandon that duty—”

It took less than a thought for Kelzara to send the Toa flying through the nearest window, and only slightly more effort to send Zaru out after him.

Ensuring that none of the energy altered the flow of power to the Matoran’s heart tone?

Now  _ that _ was a challenge, one almost worth the humiliation and sorrow of having hurt one of her charges.

* * *

There were one hundred Makuta scattered across the island chains, and among those one hundred perhaps three understood what the term ‘knowledge’ actually meant.

A fact was not knowledge. Anyone could memorize facts. Most Rahi could remember things, and a select few could do substantially more than that. Even the Matoran could use facts, recorded on stone in great stretches of carved circles, and yet imprinting an idea upon a rock did not make the rock more capable of thought.

Many considered themselves learned because they could tell Kelzara the names of every beast they’d ever created, and then failed to explain  _ why _ they would create such things.

Perhaps ironically, the ratio of learners to ignoramuses seemed to become more balanced as the population became less able to affect the world. Kelzara had liked what she’d seen of the first few generations of Toa, and the resilience of Matoran in the face of fundamentally-hostile environments was endlessly fascinating. It had been their tools she’d copied when designing the claws of the Muka Cat, and seeing the corresponding increase in lethality had given her a warm glow of pride. Such innovation deserved both recognition and study, and when it had been determined that a Matoran settlement needed more assistance than the initial team of Toa could provide she’d jumped at the chance.

While Kelzara couldn’t say she  _ regretted _ the decision, her positive feelings about her new post had not lasted one month in contact with the Toa Fortato.

“What do you think you were doing, being that violent!? You could’ve hurt Maranga!” This time it was Sentaro, the Toa of Stone. Kelzara wished that a mis-handling of power had transformed his brain into a small sphere of granite, for someone with the powers of a Toa that possessed so little self-awareness without such a crippling mutation was too sad a development to consider.

“He was disturbing my ability to operate safely. I used the minimum amount of force to ensure that he would not interfere further, and to my knowledge he wasn’t hurt.” Kelzara exerted some power, slightly twisting the organic material in the shell she’d crafted. While the Rahkshi were hardly adequate models for a proper Rahi, their forms had given her an idea about different abdominal structures which would allow for more efficient scavenging.

She didn’t mention the countless instances of infrastructure damage Sentaro had been party to as he showed off to the Matoran. It would make him feel uncomfortable for minutes at most, then quickly be rationalized away as somehow her fault. This would not be helped by the pseudo-intellectual Cielian, the local Toa of Ice, spouting ambiguous prophecies that somehow always justified the Toa Forato’s extravagances, believing that her Mask of Foresight bestowed something more than prenatural reflexes. 

_ Though to be fair, in more clever hands, it would be a power to behold. _

Kelzara decided to stop humoring the Toa of Stone and took off, using a tiny amount of Power to prevent his cries of indignation from reaching her ears. So many questions to answer, so many secrets to this wonderful universe they lived in, and yet every day precious hours were lost to things like sleep, eating, and ‘conversation’ with blithering idiots.

She’d spent some time during a break between experiments doing the math, and she calculated that she’d lost several years of her life just to the mysterious hell which was the bathroom.

Something needed to change. Not because Kelzara couldn’t stand the status quo, but because it wasn’t  _ enough _ to be doing alright, to be doing sufficiently well, not when you knew that the very  _ terminology _ most of your colleagues used was wrong. She needed those extra hours to refine her raw thoughts into something pure and understandable, something that anyone could understand.

The schemas of language in her mind paused for a moment.

Now  _ there _ was a novel thought.

* * *

“This seems like a bad idea.”

While most of the Toa Forato defied the stereotypes of their elemental attributes, one would be hard-pressed to find a quieter, more cautious Toa of Earth. Though his caution never turned into outright cowardice, a complete and utter unwillingness to take risks was almost the worst sort of stagnation (the worst being enforced uniformity, fortunately a blessed rarity in Kelzara’s life).

“I’m sure that some Makuta thought much the same when Mata Nui began infusing Matoran with raw elemental power,” she said by way of reply, finishing the last of her checks on the contraption. The concepts which drove it didn’t have Matoran equivalents, but what had started off as something of a pun had eventually blossomed into an experiment which could potentially reframe many of the fundamental concepts Makuta used to interact with the world. “And yet I think we can both agree the world is better off for the Toa.”

“Mostly.”

Kelzara turned to look at Kafuku, raising an eyebrow she could soon be lacking. “I didn’t recall asking for your opinion, only your Power.”

“Well, if you’re sure, then I’m certain it will work out. For you, at least,” Fuento commented, staggering in his irregular, stuttering way to the control panel.

That made Kelzara pause, and she turned to look at the Ta-Matoran.

The wound from the Rahi had left him with a severe limp, no sense of humor, and a better understanding of relative risk than anyone else on the island (including her). She’d given him veto power on any and every experiment she attempted to undertake, and while he’d never exercised it he had demanded more safety measures than she’d initially considered (frequently frustrating, sometimes crucial). While she had more than a few millennia on any other thinking being of the island she’d also learned to listen to those who were perhaps more mortal than she was. “What are you worrying about? Specifically.”

“If you fail, one percent of the Makuta are gone. If you succeed, then ninety-nine percent of the Makuta are going to be different.” Fuento shrugged one shoulder. The other typically never moved from its slumped position. “If you say it could lead to a major breakthrough, I’ll believe you. If you say it could scatter you across the known and unknown parts of the universe, I’ll also believe that.”

Kelzara let the room stay silent for a minute, considering the facial expressions of the three people on the island of Preta Nui.

“I am committed,” she started, meeting their eyes one by one. “This is precisely the sort of knowledge we need in order to meaningfully move forward. Trial and error is slow, costly, and prone to going down useless rabbit holes. If I’m right, this process will enable me to understand the world through a different, more complex lens, one which could shave thousands of years off the timeline of multiple branches of research.

“I hear your concerns, and am planning to proceed anyway.”

The two Toa looked at one another, then went to a pair of silver chambers, where they’d channel raw elemental power into the machine for powering it. Fuento held her gaze a few moments longer, then turned away and put his hand on the activation lever.

Something curled in Kelzara’s gut, and her mouth moved without thought. “Thank you.”

A few minutes later and her gut was gone.

* * *

What was Power?

The more Kelzara had explored the abilities inherent to the Makuta species, the more she was convinced that the question had a single, ultimately-reducible answer. ‘Sonics’ had turned out to be little more than air moving particularly quickly, lightning and fire had been revealed to be essentially the same, and the difference between stone and earth was entirely fictional. Though she hadn’t shared these insights with anyone else, she’d passively observed Toa and Makuta unconsciously manipulating different ‘elements’ when using supposedly-different powers... which implied that perhaps they weren’t so different after all.

Furthermore, after dissecting countless failed breeds of Rahi, at no point had she found a substantial difference between organic and inorganic material. Yes, the organic material was detailed beyond belief, intricate beyond her current capabilities to produce using metal and rock, but not beyond her wildest dreams. A sufficiently-sophisticated Exo-Toa, for example, could walk, move, and fight on its own. Theoretically, one could give it sonic powers, and thus a voice. Enough programming would make it indistinguishable from a Toa of Sonics (or a very smart Toa of Air) to anyone who could not see inside of it.

So what made the Matoran ‘Matoran’ and not Rahi, or the Makuta ‘Makuta’ and not complex machines?

As her arms began to turn into pure Antidermis, Kelzara  _ felt _ unlike she had ever touched before. She sensed the tiny part of the air with a sensitivity that was at once overwhelming at perfectly natural; she saw the tiny forces of magnetism that tied ferric metals to itself and could be tugged at will; the world radiated heat that denied the very concept of cold, revealing Ice and Fire to both be fundamentally false terms. Each moment of disintegration (it wasn’t disintegration, that was the abolishing of bonds between minute particles: this was closer to  _ sublimation _ ) led to an exponential increase in her understanding that was essentially  _ rapture _ .

In the moment before the process took her mind, Kelzara realized that her form still needed a body, and that the conversion process had left her without one. Rather than fear, however, a cool acceptance had replaced her ambition, like the moments when she saw a creation take its first step and she knew it would survive. This process, this reduction of her being to its most basic component, had allowed her to see the world like Mata Nui did, even if it was only for a moment.

The world faded away, and then there was only peace.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not a Halloween snip, sorry, just more rambling about pre-Disaster OC's. Yes, I know Chirox was the person who canonically figured out that Makuta didn't need physical bodies, but this wouldn't be the first time a male scientist claimed credit for something that was discovered by a woman (cough cough Lovelace cough cough).


End file.
